Adam Kelly
University of Oxford
Adam is a doctoral researcher at Worcester College, University of Oxford. He works on the representation of melancholy in medieval English poetry, studying the formation of ‘antidepressive’ variants of the condition through literature.
His research has two main strands, the first focusing on the collective experience of heroic and ecclesiastical melancholies in the composition and performance of Old English poetry, and the second considering the development of melancholy as an individual aesthetic in the late-medieval poetry of Thomas Hoccleve. Uniting these is an interest in the diverse and cross-cultural ways that melancholic experience is considered ‘antidepressive’ in medieval literature, preventing despair, attuning its sufferers to the world, and offering a privileged understanding of God.
As co-founder and reluctant namesake of the ADAM network, Adam is especially interested in the difficulties of teaching 'difficult topics', as well as the effect on the wellbeing of researchers and their supervisors.
Grace O’Duffy
Harvard University
Grace's research focuses on gendered and sexual violence in medieval literature. She recently completed her doctoral thesis at St John's College, University of Oxford, where her thesis examined sexual violence in the Old Norse fornaldarsögur and Íslendingasögur. In summer 2025, she will join the Harvard Society of Fellows to develop her doctoral work and begin a new project on rape narratives across medieval Europe.
Despite the popular misconception of Vikings as 'raiders and rapists', little scholarly attention has been devoted to sexual violence in Old Norse literature, and Grace's work aims to discuss the vast and varied ways in which sexual violence and coercion are threaded through Old Norse saga and myth. She has published recent work on gendered violence in Hrólfs saga kraka in Scandinavian Studies, and written on the hitherto unnoticed sexually violent nature of three scenes in Bósa saga ok Herrauðs in Saga-Book.
Grace is especially interested in the evasive language and shifting conceptualisation of sexual violence across time. She hopes that ADAM will help lay a path across the rough terrain of the language used to discuss 'difficult' topics'.
Elliot Worrall
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Elliot specializes in the representation of identity in Old Norse saga literature. He began his academic career with an undergraduate degree in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon studies at the University of Aberdeen, where his thesis examined the role of gender in Old Norse portrayals of Sámi alterity. He continued his studies with an RMA in Medieval History at Utrecht University, where his master’s thesis explored racial “blackness” in the 15th century Icelandic text Ectors saga.
Currently, Elliot is pursuing a PhD at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf as part of the Post-REALM project. This project aims to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the production, reception, and dissemination of medieval European literature, using the 26 extant versions of the Floire et Blancheflor romance. Elliot’s doctoral research builds on the work of this project, examining representations of identity – particularly class, gender, race, and religion – in the Scandinavian texts of this tradition.
Elliot is particularly interested in how personal experience, or a lack thereof, effects how scholars engage with 'difficult' topics. He hopes that ADAM will encourage medievalists to give greater consideration to their positionality in relation to these topics.
A.D.A.M. 